BGU | MY PATH, Haim Doron, MD

and I remained in close personal contact. Whenever I encountered a complex problem in medical administration, without hesitation I would request that Prof. Efrati chair a committee established to examine the issue at hand. Dr. Haim Gordon was a senior internist at Beilinson whom I brought to serve as director at Kaplan Hospital. As head of Kaplan for many years, he was not only an able administrator, but also an exceedingly fair and honest person. Dr. Gordon was a Holocaust survivor from Slovakia, and in the 1970s was very involved in illegal immigration from the Soviet bloc. In this capacity, he was appointed representative of an institution tied to Eastern European Jewry. I much admired his devotion. Soroka Hospital in Beer Sheva I have already described conditions at the Hadassah hospital in Beer Sheva when I arrived in the city. In fact, I was familiar with the hospital from both sides since our eldest son was born there. Although Hadassah had plans to establish a modest new hospital in Beer Sheva, the Beer Sheva plan was scrapped when Hadassah decided to focus solely on the its hospital in Jerusalem. I have also described the fact that there was a disagreement between David Tuviahu, the mayor of Beer Sheva, and David Ben-Gurion, who was living in the Negev south of Beer Sheva. David Tuviyahu had a dream of both a university and also a large hospital in Beer Sheva. He also favored that Clalit would build the hospital; whereas Ben-Gurion favored the state. BothMoshe Soroka, head of Clalit, and Israel Barzilai, the Minister of Health, suffered from severe heart disease. When Barzilai was hospitalized, Soroka visited him in Beilinson hospital where the two signed an agreement that the state would build a hospital in Ashkelon, today Barzilai Hospital, and Clalit would build a hospital in Beer Sheva. Suffice it to say, this arrangement didn’t please Ben-Gurion, but it became a fact of life for him. The American Union leader David Dubinsky, head of the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, stepped forward with a substantial contribution to the Labor Federation’s donor campaign in America for building a large hospital in Beer Sheva. But when the Federation ‘translated’ the gift into net dollars and cents for the hospital, not much was left. 86 Nonetheless, in 1960, the Central Hospital for the Negev, now Soroka Hospital, opened. Clalit appointed Prof. Josef Stern as director of the new hospital parallel to his serving as director of one of the internal medicine departments. Prof. Stern, who had studied both medicine and life sciences in Italy, had been an internist at Beilinson, at one point directing Beilinson’s department of emergency medicine. In parallel to the building of the Beer Sheva hospital, a housing complex, facing the facility, was added for new department heads. Tongue-in-cheek, staff dubbed it “Blair House”. 87 The apartment building did house the families of all the ‘movers and shakers’ at the hospital, including Prof. Josef Stern, director of the hospital; Prof. Noah Ben Aderet, 88 director of the women and new mothers department, who had previously been on staff at Kaplan hospital; Prof. Gabriel Terek, director of the orthopedics department, who had come from the government hospital in 86 The ILWGU, the International Ladies Garment Industry Union, of the United States and Canada (Op cit., Footnote 38) made a gift of $1,000,000 in 1956 earmarked specifically for building the hospital; but the Labor Federation siphoned-off $600,000, claiming this was for the Federation’s donor campaign. Only $400,000 remained for building the hospital, See details in Shifra Shvarts, Health and Zionism, The University of Rochester Press 2008, pp. 247-261. https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781580462792/health-and-zionism/ 87 Blair House is the U.S. President’s Guest House. It is across the street from the White House, in Washington, DC. 88 Prof. Noah Ben Aderet (1925-1988), a gynecologist, was among those who pioneered Soroka Medical Center and Ben-Gurion University’s medical school and was the founder of the Division of Gynecology and Obstetrics. After Dr. Gordon left Kaplan hospital, I appointed Prof. Yossi Proust as Kaplan’s chief administrator. Later Prof. Proust served as director of Clalit’s Jerusalem region.

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